"I cannot read Dickens!" How many people make this confession, with a
front of brass, and do not seem to know how poor a figure they cut!
George Eliot says that a difference of taste in jokes is a great cause of
domestic discomfort. A difference of taste in books, when it is decided
and vigorous, breaks many a possible friendship, and nips many a young
liking in the bud. I would not willingly seem intolerant. A man may not
like Sophocles, may speak disrespectfully of Virgil, and even sneer at
Herodotus, and yet may be endured. But he or she (it is usually she) who
contemns Scott, and "cannot read Dickens," is a person with whom I would
fain have no further converse. If she be a lady, and if one meets her at
dinner, she must of course be borne with, and "suffered gladly." But she
has dug a gulf that nothing can bridge; she may be fair, clever and
popular, but she is Anathema. I feel towards her (or him if he wears a
beard) as Bucklaw did towards the person who should make inquiries about
that bridal night of Lammermoor.
But this admission does not mean that one is sealed of the tribe of
Charles--that one is a Dickensite pure and simple, convinced and
devout--any more than Mr. Matthew Arnold was a Wordsworthian. Dickens
has many such worshippers, especially (and this is an argument in favour
of the faith) among those who knew him in his life. He must have had a
wonderful charm; for his friends in life are his literary partisans, his
uncompromising partisans, even to this day. They will have no
half-hearted admiration, and scout him who tries to speak of Dickens as
of an artist not flawless, no less than they scorn him who cannot read
Dickens at all. At one time this honourable enthusiasm (as among the
Wordsworthians) took the shape of "endless imitation." That is over;
only here and there is an imitator of the master left in the land. All
his own genius was needed to carry his mannerisms; the mannerisms without
the genius were an armour that no devoted David had proved, that none
could wear with success.
Of all great writers since Scott, Dickens is probably the man to whom the
world owes most gratitude. No other has caused so many sad hearts to be
lifted up in laughter; no other has added so much mirth to the toilsome
and perplexed life of men, of poor and rich, of learned and unlearned. "A
vast hope has passed across the world," says Alfred de Musset; we may say
that with Dickens a happy smile, a joyous laugh, went round this earth.
To have made us laugh so frequently, so inextinguishably, so kindly--that
is his great good deed. It will be said, and with a great deal of truth,
that he has purged us with pity and terror as well as with laughter. But
it is becoming plain that his command of tears is less assured than of
old, and I cannot honestly regret that some of his pathos--not all, by
any means--is losing its charm and its certainty of appeal. Dickens's
humour was rarely too obvious; it was essentially personal, original,
quaint, unexpected, and his own. His pathos was not infrequently derived
from sources open to all the world, and capable of being drawn from by
very commonplace writers. Little Nells and Dombeys, children unhappy,
overthrown early in the _melee_ of the world, and dying among weeping
readers, no longer affect us as they affected another generation. Mrs.
Beecher Stowe and the author of "Misunderstood," once made some people
weep like anything by these simple means. Ouida can do it; plenty of
people can do it. Dickens lives by virtue of what none but he can do: by
virtue of Sairey Gamp, and Sam Weller, and Dick Swiveller, and Mr.
Squeers, with a thousand other old friends, of whom we can never weary.
No more than Cleopatra's can custom stale _their_ infinite variety.
I do not say that Dickens' pathos is always of the too facile sort, which
plays round children's death-beds. Other pathos he has, more fine and
not less genuine. It may be morbid and contemptible to feel "a great
inclination to cry" over David Copperfield's boyish infatuation for
Steerforth; but I feel it. Steerforth was a "tiger,"--as Major Pendennis
would have said, a tiger with his curly hair and his ambrosial whiskers.
But when a little boy loses his heart to a big boy he does not think of
this. Traddles thought of it. "Shame, J. Steerforth!" cried Traddles,
when Steerforth bullied the usher. Traddles had not lost his heart, nor
set up the big boy as a god in the shrine thereof. But boys do these
things; most of us have had our Steerforths--tall, strong, handsome,
brave, good-humoured. Far off across the years I see the face of such an
one, and remember that emotion which is described in "David Copperfield,"
chap. xix., towards the end of the chapter. I don't know any other
novelist who has touched this young and absolutely disinterested belief
of a little boy in a big one--touched it so kindly and seriously, that is
there is a hint of it in "Dr. Birch's School Days."
But Dickens is always excellent in his boys, of whom he has drawn dozens
of types--all capital. There is Tommy Traddles, for example. And how
can people say that Dickens could not draw a gentleman? The boy who
shouted, "Shame, J. Steerforth!" was a gentleman, if one may pretend to
have an opinion about a theme so difficult. The Dodger and Charley Bates
are delightful boys--especially Bates. Pip, in the good old days, when
he was the prowling boy, and fought Herbert Pocket, was not less
attractive, and Herbert himself, with his theory and practice of the art
of self-defence--could Nelson have been more brave, or Shelley (as in Mr.
Matthew Arnold's opinion) more "ineffectual"? Even the boys at Dotheboys
Hall are each of them quite distinct. Dickens's boys are almost as dear
to me as Thackeray's--as little Rawdon himself. There is one exception.
I cannot interest myself in Little Dombey. Little David Copperfield is a
jewel of a boy with a turn for books. Doubtless he is created out of
Dickens's memories of himself as a child. That is true pathos again, and
not overwrought, when David is sent to Creakle's, and his poor troubled
mother dare hardly say farewell to him.
And this brings us back to that debatable thing--the pathos of
Dickens--from which one has been withdrawn by the attractions of his
boys. Little Dombey is a prize example of his pathos. Little Nell is
another. Jeffrey, of the _Edinburgh Review_, who criticised "Marmion"
and the "Lady of the Lake" so vindictively, shed tears over Little Nell.
It is a matter of taste, or, as Science might say, of the lachrymal
glands as developed in each individual. But the lachrymal glands of this
amateur are not developed in that direction. Little Dombey and Little
Nell leave me with a pair of dry eyes. I do not "melt visibly" over
Little Dombey, like the weak-eyed young man who took out his books and
trunk to the coach. The poor little chap was feeble and feverish, and
had dreams of trying to stop a river with his childish hands, or to choke
it with sand. It may be very good pathology, but I cannot see that it is
at all right pathos. One does not like copy to be made out of the
sufferings of children or of animals. One's heart hardens: the object is
too manifest, the trick is too easy. Conceive a child of Dombey's age
remarking, with his latest breath, "Tell them that the picture on the
stairs at school is not Divine enough!" That is not the delirium of
infancy, that is art-criticism: it is the _Athenaeum_ on Mr. Holman Hunt.
It is not true to nature; it is not good in art: it is the kind of thing
that appears in Sunday-school books about the virtuous little boy who
died. There is more true pathos in many a page of "Huckleberry Finn."
Yet this is what Jeffrey gushed over. "There has been nothing like the
actual dying of that sweet Paul." So much can age enfeeble the
intellect, that he who had known Scott, and yet nibbled at his fame,
descended to admiring the feeblest of false sentiment. As for Little
Nell, who also has caused floods of tears to be shed, her case is
sufficiently illustrated by the picture in the first edition ("Master
Humphrey's Clock,", 1840, p. 210):
"'When I die
Put near me something that has loved the light,
And had the sky above it always.' Those
Were her words."
"Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead!"
The pathos is about as good as the prose, and _that_ is blank verse. Are
the words in the former quotation in the least like anything that a
little girl would say? A German sentimentalist might have said them;
Obermann might have murmured them in his weaker moments. Let us try a
piece of domestic pathos by another hand. It is the dawn of Waterloo.
"Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed's foot, and looked
at the sleeping girl. How dared he--who was he--to pray for one so
spotless! God bless her! God bless her! He came to the bedside, and
looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep, and he bent over
the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale face. Two fair arms
closed tenderly round his neck as he stooped down. 'I am awake, George,'
the poor child said, with a sob."
I know I am making enemies of a large proportion of the readers of this
page. "Odious, sneering beast!" is the quotation which they will apply,
perhaps unconscious of its origin, to a critic who is humble but would
fain be honest, to a critic who thinks that Dickens has his weak places,
and that his pathos is one of these. It cannot be helped. Each of us
has his author who is a favourite, a friend, an idol, whose immaculate
perfection he maintains against all comers. For example, things are
urged against Scott; I receive them in the attitude of the deaf adder of
St. Augustine, who stops one ear with his tail and presses the other
against the dust. The same with Moliere: M. Scherer utters complaints
against Moliere! He would not convince me, even if I were convinced. So,
with regard to Dickens, the true believer will not listen, he will not be
persuaded. But if any one feels a little shaken, let him try it another
way. There is a character in M. Alphonse Daudet's "Froment Jeune et
Rissler Aine"--a character who, people say, is taken bodily from Dickens.
This is Desiree Delobelle, the deformed girl, the daughter of _un rate_,
a pretentious imbecile actor. She is poor, stunted, laborious, toiling
at a small industry; she is in love, is rejected, she tries to drown
herself, she dies. The sequence of ideas is in Dickens's vein; but read
the tale, and I think you will see how little the thing is overdone, how
simple and unforced it is, compared with analogous persons and scenes in
the work of the English master. The idiotic yell of "plagiarism" has
been raised, of course, by critical _cretins_. M. Daudet, as I
understand what he says in "Trente Ans de Paris," had not read Dickens at
all, when he wrote "Froment Jeune"--certainly had not read "Our Mutual
Friend." But there is something of Dickens's genius in M. Daudet's, and
that something is kept much better in hand by the Frenchman, is more
subordinated to the principles of taste and of truth.
On the other hand, to be done with this point, look at Delobelle, the
father of Desiree, and compare him with Dickens's splendid strollers,
with Mr. Vincent Crummles, and Mr. Lenville, and the rest. As in Desiree
so in Delobelle, M. Daudet's picture is much the more truthful. But it
is truthful with a bitter kind of truth. Now, there is nothing not
genial and delightful in Crummles and Mrs. Crummles and the Infant
Phenomenon. Here Dickens has got into a region unlike the region of the
pathetic, into a world that welcomes _charge_ or caricature, the world of
humour. We do not know, we never meet Crummleses quite so
unsophisticated as Vincent, who is "not a Prussian," who "can't think who
puts these things into the papers." But we do meet stage people who come
very near to this _naivete_ of self-advertisement, and some of whom are
just as dismal as Crummles is delightful.
Here, no doubt, is Dickens's _forte_. Here his genius is all pure gold,
in his successful studies or inventions of the humorous, of character
parts. One literally does not know where to begin or end in one's
admiration for this creative power that peopled our fancies with such
troops of dear and impossible friends. "Pickwick" comes practically
first, and he never surpassed "Pickwick." He was a poor story-teller,
and in "Pickwick" he had no story to tell; he merely wandered at
adventure in that merrier England which was before railways were.
"Pickwick" is the last of the stories of the road that begin in the
wandering, aimless, adventurous romances of Greece, or in Petronius
Arbiter, and that live with the life of "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote," of
"Le Roman Comique," of "Tom Jones" and "Joseph Andrews." These tales are
progresses along highways bristling with adventure, and among inns full
of confusion, Mr. Pickwick's affair with the lady with yellow curl-papers
being a mild example. Though "Tom Jones" has a plot so excellent, no
plot is needed here, and no consecutive story is required. Detached
experiences, vagrants of every rank that come and go, as in real life,
are all the material of the artist. With such materials Dickens was
exactly suited; he was at home on high-road and lane, street and field-
path, in inns and yeomen's warm hospitable houses. Never a humour
escaped him, and he had such a wealth of fun and high spirits in these
glad days as never any other possessed before. He was not in the least a
bookish man, not in any degree a scholar; but Nature taught him, and
while he wrote with Nature for his teacher, with men and women for his
matter, with diversion for his aim, he was unsurpassable--nay, he was
unapproachable.
He could not rest here; he was, after all, a child of an age that grew
sad, and earnest, and thoughtful. He saw abuses round him--injustice,
and oppression, and cruelty. He had a heart to which those things were
not only abhorrent, but, as it were, maddening. He knew how great an
influence he wielded, and who can blame him for using it in any cause he
thought good? Very possibly he might have been a greater artist if he
had been less of a man, if he had been quite disinterested, and had never
written "with a purpose." That is common, and even rather obsolete
critical talk. But when we remember that Fielding, too, very often wrote
"with a purpose," and that purpose the protection of the poor and
unfriended; and when we remember what an artist Fielding was, I do not
see how we can blame Dickens. Occasionally he made his art and his
purpose blend so happily that his work was all the better for his
benevolent intentions. We owe Mr. Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Fanny Squeers,
Wackford and all, to Dickens's indignation against the nefarious school
pirates of his time. If he is less successful in attacking the Court of
Chancery, and very much less successful still with the Red Tape and
Circumlocution Office affairs, that may be merely because he was less in
the humour, and not because he had a purpose in his mind. Every one of a
man's books cannot be his masterpiece. There is nothing in literary talk
so annoying as the spiteful joy with which many people declare that an
author is "worked out," because his last book is less happy than some
that went before. There came a time in Dickens' career when his works,
to my own taste and that of many people, seemed laboured, artificial--in
fact, more or less failures. These books range from "Dombey and Son,"
through "Little Dorrit," I dare not say to "Our Mutual Friend." One is
afraid that "Edwin Drood," too, suggests the malady which Sir Walter
already detected in his own "Peveril of the Peak." The intense strain on
the faculties of Dickens--as author, editor, reader, and man of the
world--could not but tell on him; and years must tell. "Philip" is not
worthy of the author of "Esmond," nor "Daniel Deronda" of the author of
"Silas Marner." At that time--the time of the Dorrits and
Dombeys--_Blackwood's Magazine_ published a "Remonstrance with Boz"; nor
was it quite superfluous. But Dickens had abundance of talent still to
display--above all in "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities."
The former is, after "Pickwick," "Copperfield," "Martin Chuzzlewit," and
"Nicholas Nickleby"--after the classics, in fact--the most delightful of
Dickens's books. The story is embroiled, no doubt. What are we to think
of Estelle? Has the minx any purpose? Is she a kind of Ethel Newcome of
odd life? It is not easy to say; still, for a story of Dickens's the
plot is comparatively clear and intelligible. For a study of a child's
life, of the nature Dickens drew best--the river and the marshes--and for
plenty of honest explosive fun, there is no later book of Dickens's like
"Great Expectations." Miss Havisham, too, in her mouldy bridal
splendour, is really impressive; not like Ralph Nickleby and Monk in
"Oliver Twist"--a book of which the plot remains to me a mystery. {128}
Pip and Pumblechook and Mr. Wopsle and Jo are all immortal, and cause
laughter inextinguishable. The rarity of this book, by the way, in its
first edition--the usual library three volumes--is rather difficult to
explain. One very seldom sees it come into the market, and then it is
highly priced.
I have mentioned more than once the obscurity of Dickens's plots. This
difficulty may be accounted for in a very flattering manner. Where do we
lose ourselves? Not in the bare high-road, but among lanes, between
hedges hung with roses, blackberries, morning glories, where all about us
is so full of pleasure that our attention is distracted and we miss our
way. Now, in Dickens--in "Oliver Twist," in "Martin Chuzzlewit," in
"Nicholas Nickleby"--there is, as in the lanes, so much to divert and
beguile, that we cease to care very much where the road leads--a road so
full of happy marvels. The dark, plotting villains--like the tramp who
frightened Sir Walter Scott so terribly, as he came from Miss Baillie's
at Hampstead--peer out from behind the hedges now and then. But we are
too much amused by the light hearts that go all the way, by the Dodger
and Crummles and Mrs. Gamp, to care much for what Ralph, and Monk, and
Jonas Chuzzlewit are plotting. It may not be that the plot is so
confused, but that we are too much diverted to care for the plot, for the
incredible machinations of Uriah Heap, to choose another example. Mr.
Micawber cleared these up; but it is Mr. Micawber that hinders us from
heeding them.
This, at least, is a not unfriendly explanation. Yet I cannot but
believe that, though Dickens took great pains with his plots, he was not
a great plotter. He was not, any more than Thackeray, a story-teller
first and foremost. We can hold in our minds every thread of Mr. Wilkie
Collins' web, or of M. Fortune du Boisgobey's, or of M. Gaboriau's--all
great weavers of intrigues. But Dickens goes about darkening his
intrigue, giving it an extra knot, an extra twist, hinting here,
ominously laughing there, till we get mystified and bored, and give
ourselves up to the fun of the humours, indifferent to the destinies of
villains and victims. Look at "Edwin Drood." A constant war about the
plot rages in the magazines. I believe, for one, that Edwin Drood was
resuscitated; but it gives me no pleasure. He was too uninteresting.
Dickens's hints, nods, mutterings, forebodings, do not at all impress one
like that deepening and darkening of the awful omens in "The Bride of
Lammermoor." Here Scott--unconsciously, no doubt--used the very manner
of Homer in the Odyssey, and nowhere was his genius more Homeric. That
was romance.
The "Tale of Two Cities" is a great test of the faith--that is in
Dickensites. Of all his works it is the favourite with the wrong sort!
Ladies prefer it. Many people can read it who cannot otherwise read
Dickens at all. This in itself proves that it is not a good example of
Dickens, that it is not central, that it is an outlying province which he
conquered. It is not a favourite of mine. The humour of the humorous
characters rings false--for example, the fun of the resurrection-man with
the wife who "flops." But Sidney Carton has drawn many tears down cheeks
not accustomed to what Mr. B. in "Pamela" calls "pearly fugitives."
It sometimes strikes one that certain weaknesses in our great novelists,
in Thackeray as well as Dickens, were caused by their method of
publication. The green and yellow leaves flourished on the trees for two
whole years. Who (except Alexandre the Great) could write so much, and
yet all good? Do we not all feel that "David Copperfield" should have
been compressed? As to "Pendennis," Mr. Thackeray's bad health when he
wrote it might well cause a certain languor in the later pages. Moreover,
he frankly did not care for the story, and bluffly says, in the preface,
that he respited Colonel Altamont almost at the foot of the gallows.
Dickens took himself more in earnest, and, having so many pages to fill,
conscientiously made Uriah Heap wind and wriggle through them all.
To try to see blots in the sun, and to pick holes in Dickens, seems
ungrateful, and is indeed an ungrateful task; to no mortal man have more
people owed mirth, pleasure, forgetfulness of care, knowledge of life in
strange places. There never was such another as Charles Dickens, nor
shall we see his like sooner than the like of Shakespeare. And he owed
all to native genius and hard work; he owed almost nothing to literature,
and that little we regret. He was influenced by Carlyle, he adopted his
method of nicknames, and of hammering with wearisome iteration on some
peculiarity--for example, on Carker's teeth, and the patriarch's white
hair. By the way, how incredible is all the Carker episode in "Dombey"!
Surely Dickens can never have intended Edith, from the first, to behave
as she did! People may have influenced him, as they influenced Scott
about "St. Ronan's Well." It has been said that, save for Carlyle,
Dickens was in letters a self-taught artist, that he was no man's pupil,
and borrowed from none. No doubt this makes him less acceptable to the
literary class than a man of letters, like Thackeray--than a man in whose
treasure chamber of memory all the wealth of the Middle Ages was stored,
like Scott. But the native naked genius of Dickens,--his heart, his
mirth, his observation, his delightful high spirits, his intrepid
loathing of wrong, his chivalrous desire to right it,--these things will
make him for ever, we hope and believe, the darling of the English
people.